Love of Knowledge
A background of all the other intellectual virtues is an epistemically right orientation of the will: a discriminating concern for propositional knowledge, understanding, and acquaintance. The standards of discrimination here are significance, relevance, and worthiness. Worthiness of knowledge is sometimes parasitic on ‘practical’ concerns, and sometimes is determined by the intrinsic value of the object of knowledge. The virtue under discussion is not only a concern to have knowledge, but also a concern to purvey it to others; thus it includes truthfulness and epistemic philanthropy. The chapter examines various forms of faulty epistemic will: failure of concern to know, unvirtuous concerns to know, failures of concern not to know, and unvirtuous concerns not to know. It ends with comments on how the particular structure that one attributes to a virtue of the love of knowledge varies with metaphysical beliefs.
Keywords: epistemic will, indifferency, metaphysics, relevance, significance, worthiness
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